today's leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Apr 25, 2026

• Desktop/Laptop

  • HowTo Geek ☛ Linux enthusiasts swear by these old business laptops (and you should too)

    ThinkPads: Why do they have a cult following? What do they offer that your current laptop doesn't? They're more than mere specs; for some, they're a passion. It's a strange affinity to truly love a brand of laptop, but some swear by it—and I have five reasons.

    ThinkPads are one of the most recognizable laptops out there. They've been around for decades and adored by many. In the Linux world, ThinkPads are renowned for their fantastic compatibility and are frequently recommended. Many Linux users vouch for them (including me). But there's more to them than just hardware compatibility, and I'll go over what makes this classic brand the perfect choice for fellow geeks.

• Graphics Stack

  • Barry Kauler ☛ More fixes for Xorg Wizard

    I have tested it some more, and there are a lot more fixes. This is to /usr/sbin/xorgwizrd-cli and /inc/broken-video in the initrd.

• Applications

  • HowTo Geek ☛ 3 essential Linux apps to try this weekend (April 17 - 19)

    If your weekend plans involve doing something interesting with your Linux setup, I've done some of the legwork for you. Instead of spending three hours reading Reddit threads only to install something mediocre, here are three apps worth actually trying. One fixes cross-device file sync without touching the cloud, one makes Markdown readable in your terminal, and one turns speech into text locally without phoning home.

• Games

  • Godot Engine ☛ Dev snapshot: Godot 4.7 beta 1

    Godot 4.7 enters beta!

  • Futurism ☛ Google Exec Says Your Favorite Video Games Are Secretly Made With AI

    "Roughly nine out of 10 game developers told us 'yeah, we're using it.'"

• Desktop Environments (DE)/Window Managers (WM)

  • Darren Goossens ☛ Some unscientific memory use comparisons for a random assortment of Linux desktops and window managers

    So I did some very unscientific memory usage tests. I did them on a box running current Debian, even though they are really more relevant to retro machines with limited resources.

    First, what did I do? Well, I wanted to know how much RAM the DE/WM used before I even opened an application. I figure that an application — say, Firefox — will use around about the same amount of RAM regardless of the environment in which it is run. This may not be exactly true, because some environments will probably decorate and manage windows in different ways (that’s really DE/WM usage, but is associated with the application), but anyway that will be a small difference compared with the RAM used b a big web app like Gmail.

• Distributions and Operating Systems

  • Kevin Wammer ☛ Installing Rocknix on internal storage

    All you have to do is connect via SSH and type the command installtointernal. Next, you only need to follow the terminal prompts and you're done. During the install process, Rocknix will resize the Android install and nuke the data, so be aware of that.

  • SUSE/OpenSUSE

    • Dominique Leuenberger ☛ Tumbleweed – Review of the week 2026/17

      Dear Tumbleweed users and hackers,

      Week 17 has been quite active: a total of 900 requests have been accepted over the days, and 5 snapshots (0417, 0418, 0419, 0420, and 0422) have been successfully tested and published. One additional one was tested but then discarded due to a regression in grub2-bls / rollback snapshot selection.

  • Canonical/Ubuntu Family

    • OMG Ubuntu ☛ Canonical finally gives Launchpad (a bit of) a glow-up

      Launchpad, the home of Ubuntu development, has finally received some design attention. Canonical last updated the site’s homepage back in 2024, but many of the pages that the distro’s developers actually use or reference on a regular basis have remained untouched for the best part of a decade. Now that’s starting to change. Canonical UX designer Enzo Deng has announced that the company has “begun […] a complete redesign of the series page” for Ubuntu 26.04 LTS, describing it as the start of “the journey of modernizing the Launchpad user experience” (sic).